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Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema

A scene from the box office success, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.Credit
Warner Brothers Pictures

IN “Funny People,” the new movie starring Adam Sandler, the audience is treated to glimpses of a movie starring Mr. Sandler’s character, a stand-up comedian turned movie star named George Simmons. The film within a film, which looks like a variation on the venerable “Look Who’s Talking” theme, features George’s head digitally superimposed on the body of an infant, an effect that is both grotesque and funny, and also pregnant with cultural significance.

It’s obvious that the image of a baby with Adam Sandler’s face self-mockingly encapsulates much of Mr. Sandler’s career, pointing up his curious and durable overgrown-child appeal. And it is also clear that the film’s writer and director, Judd Apatow, is lampooning some aspects of his own work, which has shamelessly exploited (though it has also earnestly explored) the juvenile, even infantile impulses that seem to define the soul of the modern male American.

But “Funny People” is decidedly not a further indulgence of such urges, in spite of anxious and obnoxious jokes about genitals and excrement. It’s a movie about growing up, feeling sad, facing death — a long, serious film whose subject is the challenge of maturity. Which may be why, in the face of a softish opening weekend, various interpreters of box office data were quick to declare “Funny People” a flop. The summer is no time for grown-ups.

My point is not to defend Mr. Apatow’s movie, which opened to mixed reviews and which is likely to have a rich and complicated afterlife as a subject for argument. I’m more troubled about the haste to declare that “Funny People” failed to connect with its audience. A similar rush to judgment greeted Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” last month, and in those pronouncements you can hear the sound of conventional wisdom taking shape.

Or you can see it embodied in that alarming man-baby, with the braying voice and the 5 o’clock shadow affixed to a pale, flabby, diaper-wrapped trunk. There may be no more incisive rendering of Hollywood’s self-image, and perhaps no truer, more damning mirror held up to the audience. Mewling, incontinent little bundles of id with dirty minds and mouths — that’s pretty much what the major studios think of us. What do they think we want? The summer’s biggest blockbuster so far is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” an epic — four minutes longer than “Funny People” — based on a line of toys from Hasbro. And kids’ stuff has dominated the multiplexes and the Monday-morning box office tallies since May. There have been the 3-D guinea pigs of “G-Force,” the fuzzy (and 3-D) prehistoric creatures of the third “Ice Age” movie, the historical personages of the second “Night at the Museum” picture and of course the schoolboy wizard and his pals in the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series.

Those are the products overtly aimed at younger audiences. But the celebration of youth, in particular of male immaturity, extends to movies like “The Hangover,” Todd Phillips’s riotous and regressive crude-dude comedy with a superficial resemblance to the school-of-Apatow line, and J. J. Abrams’s “Star Trek,” which reimagines the beloved space-travel adventure as, essentially, a Harry Potter movie.

There are exceptions of course. “Angels & Demons” sent a cast of grownups chasing around the Vatican in search of clues to an ancient mystery. And the season’s successful romantic comedies, “The Proposal” and “The Ugly Truth,” while perfectly conventional, do their predictable business in a more or less adult setting. But everyone (at least in the United States) has already forgotten about “Angels & Demons,” and the Hollywood rom-com, in olden times a sparkling repository of wit and glamour, has been relegated to the status of commercial counterprogramming. Those are date movies, chick flicks, a condescending little something for the ladies. The real action is elsewhere, with the boys and their toys.

I know, I know. School’s out. People want an easy good time, free air-conditioning to go with their expensive snacks, a little escapism in a time of stress. These are the truisms of summer, invoked every time some pointy-headed grouch complains about the prevalence of sequels, or superhero movies, or big, dumb popcorn spectacles. We like big, dumb popcorn spectacles.

Or course we do — even the pointy-headed grouches among us. But those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

The big lesson of the summer of 2009 is that those qualities, while they may be desirable in some abstract, ideal way, don’t pay the bills. The studios, housed in large and beleaguered media conglomerates, have grown more cautious as the economy has faltered, releasing fewer movies and concentrating resources on dependable formulas. Nearly every big hit so far has been part of a franchise built on an established cultural brand.

In the case of the comedies, raunchy or romantic, the genre functions as the brand, and in the case of “Up,” the Pixar label, almost uniquely in today’s Hollywood, carries its own cachet and appeal. But otherwise (and to some extent in these cases as well) the last few months have been a festival of the known, the stuff you already bought and, from force of habit or loyalty or maybe even satisfaction, decided to upgrade.

Not every new product is a sure bet. “Terminator Salvation” didn’t do so well, but then again the original Terminator is having some trouble in his current job. From Wolverine and Mr. Spock in May through the Decepticons and wizards of July it has been a triumph of the tried and true, occasionally revitalized or decked out with novelty, but mostly just what we expected. No surprises.

What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one! (That George Simmons giant-baby comedy is called “Redo.”) Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.

The mostly pedestrian, occasionally enchanting, highly lucrative movies of this summer offer testimony to the success of that program. And the seasonal roster of winners and losers, as defined by box office tea-leaf readers, suggests some additional dividends. Toys, comic books, and familiar fictional characters are a bigger, more reliable draw than movie stars or well-known directors, and are also easier to control.

Wolverine, Captain Kirk, Harry Potter, Hasbro — those trademarks and secondary merchandising opportunities will reliably get kids into the theaters. But the examples of “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” “Public Enemies” and, perhaps, “Funny People” are widely taken to mean that artists like Denzel Washington, John Travolta, Michael Mann, Johnny Depp and Judd Apatow may not have the same guaranteed pull. Never mind that “Public Enemies” has actually done pretty well after a slow start, and that the running time, subject matter and tone of “Funny People” make it hard to compare with “Knocked Up” or “Happy Gilmore.” Conventional wisdom is always happy to ignore such nuances.

This may be because any reduction in the clout of stars or the autonomy of directors redounds to the benefit of the companies that own the copyrights and distribute the goods. And a little anthology of cautionary economic tales from this summer will prove useful in the future, when ambitions need to be corralled and egos held in check. Middle-aged actors and critically lauded directors look like extravagances rather than sound investments. Forty is the new dead. Auteur is French for unemployed. “The Hurt Locker” — the kind of fierce and fiery action movie that might have been a blockbuster once upon a time — is treated like a delicate, exotic flower, released into art houses and sold on its prestige rather than on its visceral power.

The box office numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story either. The weekend grosses, widely guessed at on Thursday night and breathlessly reported by the middle of Sunday afternoon, record the quantity of tickets purchased, but they cannot register the quality of the experience. The aggregate of receipts shows that a lot of people like going to the movies, but not necessarily that they like what they see.

Commercial success may represent the public’s embrace of a piece of creative work, or it may just represent the vindication of a marketing strategy. In bottom-line terms, this is a distinction without a difference. A movie that people will go and see, almost as if they had no choice, is a safer business proposition than one they may have to bother thinking about. In this respect “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is exemplary. It brilliantly stymies reflection, thwarts argument, arrests intelligent response. The most interesting thing about the movie — apart from Megan Fox’s outfits, I suppose — is that it has made nearly $400 million domestically.

There is nothing else to say. Any further discussion — say about whether it’s a good movie or not — sounds quaint, old-fashioned, passé. Get a clue, grandpa.

Or go see “Up,” the only hugely successful movie of the summer that engages genuinely adult themes. It’s about loss, frustration, disappointment. And it offers one of the season’s most pointed and paradoxical lessons. If you want to make a mature film for mature audiences, make sure it’s a cartoon.